to be jealous of Phillip Green and his family at their £16,000 a night luxury villa in Barbados

[EggFriedRice]

Some people are so lucky here we are trapped in a snow covered Britain whilst some high profile tax avoiding folk are ejoying the luxury of exclusive hotels in Barbados, but I suppose when you are paid an enormous £1.2 billion tax free bonus, equivalent to £3.3 million per day ( paid in 2005 to Arcadia owner Tina Green) you have to spend it somewhere . No sale shopping for the Greens they'll miss the bargains in BHS. Topshop & Dorothy Perkins as they'll still be on their hols, but would they buy clothes in their own shops anyway I hope that the protests by UK Uncut to boycott Arcadia shops will lead to scrutiny of tax avoidance in the UK.

He pays his fair share of taxes - in other words, what the law says he has to pay.

I avoid as much tax as I can. Just yesterday, I bought a book that I would otherwise have bought in February, maybe, in order to avoid the extra VAT.

Is it my "moral duty" to pay the difference to the exchequer?

If not, then why is it his moral duty?

Is it morally OK to avoid about 2p in tax on my book transaction, like me, but morally wrong to avoid £1bn, like him? If so, why? Our intentions are exactly the same - to minimise the amount of tax we are legally obliged to pay.

What is the cutoff in order to justify the sanctimony of the left, edam, and who should be responsible for setting this limit?

I would really really love his wife to leave him

Taking all his money with her.

I would laugh for a week solid

If we reduced corporation tax in the uk then perhaps Mr Green and his ilk wouldn't take their business offshore.

If our tax system wasn't so wretchedly complicated he wouldn't be able to exploit loopholes either.

Longfingernails - books are VAT exempt so you don't need to worry about the tax hike on that.

I even knew that!

I used to be so switched-on and sharp - now I feel I am slowly but surely becoming stupider. Ah well, it was probably just the callow confidence of youth anyway :o

"He's free to do what he likes with his own money. But not with ours" - edam

And there is the real problem.

Its not your money Edam, its his. HMRC take as much money from people as they can, but at the end of the day he owns the money. Never forget that.

You arent allowing him to keep his wealth becasue it is his wealth. The truth of it is you have your begging bowl out asking him to contribute. You are the grasping partner in this relationship, and that is why thread like these are so laughable.

His wife owns the money

She might do, but I think he had a pretty good hand increasing it for her.

It is ironic that politicans complain about people legitimately avoiding paying taxes.
When it emerged that the vast majority of our thieving, incompetent MP's were " being creative" (some illegally), by creating ridiculous expenses claims their mantra was - " it was allowed under the system"
Well whether we like it or not avoiding taxes is allowed under the system. So hopefully the shower of MP's we have elected should bear that in mind the next time they pontificate on the tax system.

Ladyblah - yeah, that'd be very entertaining.

nogrey - fair point but just because there are one group of people ripping the rest of us, doesn't make it OK for someone else to do the same.

ccp and longfinger, you can flannel all you like. Fact is his tax arrangements are blatant - he isn't saving £4k in an ISA, he's giving all the money earned from the UK to his wife who just happens to be resident in a completely different company that just happens to be a tax haven. And then he has the cheek to advise the government on saving money!

different country, obviously!

edam He sounds like an excellent candidate to be advising the government on saving money.

He is obviously very good at it.

Perhaps naively, I originally thought that Philip Green's error, according to the left, was in the amount avoided - but curiously, I could never get a straight answer as to what amount of avoided tax leads to UK Uncut unilaterally deciding that you are evil.

I obviously missed a crucial element: the importance of "blatancy".

So actually, it's OK if I avoid tax by saving in an ISA, but if I shout from the rooftops about it, I am the spawn of Beelzebub? Have I got this right?

I'm not jealous of him. I don't know anything about him. He might have all sorts of worries I don't know about.

Christmas in a swanky hotel with Simon Cowell etc. sounds stressful to me - but then I am not used to moving in those circles!

My 2 year old DS has spent the whole day laughing and playing. He is dressed mostly in hand-me-downs but he doesn't care and nor do I! We live in a safe, warm house, supported and loved my gorgeous DH... we don't have foreign holidays but we did go to the seaside for 5 days this summer... I'm very lucky and I know it.

@Longfingernails. Please do not put words into my mouth. If you re-read what I said, I did not attack the very wealthy. What I said was that they should be subject to the same scrutiny as small businesses which is quite strict and there is nothing wrong with that. Employees are subject to tax on their pay that they cannot get away from so what's wrong with their bosses (people like myself and Green) paying their fair share?

I also added that they should be prepared to pay their full tax because at the end of the day nobody really needs billions and they actually do benefit from our tax system in various non-direct ways e.g police, roads etc

I also said that if his stores closed tomorrow, someone else would full the gap.

At no point did I 'attack' rich people especially as I live in a six figure earning household myself....I just don't think its okay that many of these companies make vast amounts of profit from ordinary UK taxpayers but don't pay their full share back. Instead countries like Switzerland and Luxembourg benefit. If we all took up tax avoidance schemes, Britain would truly be broken like Greece where rich people avoided tax to the point where the country literally went bankrupt and now there are running battles in the street every night.

I champion those who worked their way to the top and they deserve what they have. However, they never created that wealth in a vacuum, other factors and people were involved. I'm betting that Green went to a state school and has used the NHS prior to being mega-wealthy, its not unfair of me to say he shouldn't be pulling up the ladder. We need every £ of tax we can get. He can pay full tax and keep everything else - he would still be richer than God and that's fine, it's his money.

I am seriously not jealous at all and don't think jealousy is the prime motivation of most of the people that object to his avoidance...London has the highest concentration of billionaires in the world simply because we are known as a tax haven for the mega-wealthy. They pay a tiny percentage of tax on their earnings compared to their cleaners, this is not on and don't try and tell me that they work billions of times harder than their cleaners so deserve to pay a smaller percentage, they don't.

Again I have no problem with rich people, I know rich people, my DH and I earn many times more than the UK average and have worked our way up from working class routes to do so. I'm pleased by this and love that I don't have to worry about money but I also think its important that I pay my taxes as it was through the the help of other peoples taxes plus my drive and a bit of luck that got me where I am today.

Finally I urge you to read The Spirit Level it may change your opinion on whether its great that there is some much economic inequality in this country.

Well said, Capricorn. Hear hear.

Interesting how some people bleat about taxes not being an individual's money, but public funds which belong to everyone,when they're posting on a thread about benefit cuts. Then suddenly when a thread about Philip green pops up, suddenly it's 'my' money they're talking about, as if he's taking money belonging to them out of their pocket!!

Fact is, like him, loathe him, or feel total indifference, he has created this wealth, and brings far more into the economy than he takes out. To bang on about being jealous is just the politics of envy. Who gives a stuff anyway? None of us know whether he's actually happy, miserable or bored shitless, so it's pointless speculation

Even if Mr Green owned 100% of the company and he lived in the UK he would have no obligation to pay out any dividends and could just reinvest the profits and therefore he would still pay no personal tax.

Is it just my imagination or are some people actually taking this thread seriously?